In Circles
by WhenISayFriend
Summary: Introspective one-shot, Cole trying to figure out some things (or all things) and getting hopelessly tangled. Set immediately after Season 1, and I have NOT watched any Season 2, so ... read at your own discretion ;)


AN: _One thing is certain, you NEVER know when the Writing Condition returns. After ages of (inadvertent) fanfiction abstinence this happened after watching '12 Monkeys', pretty much by accident (blame amazon)._  
 _While I am glad that apparently inspiration is lurking somewhere all the time, I am sort of sorry it did not choose to revive my current (Ha. More or less...) Sherlock story. Especially as that one is a gift to an incredible friend, Impractical Beekeeping._  
 _As a half-decent solution to this problem, THIS is a gift to said friend as well - which is twice as funny as usually because this time round not only did she have to beta it - she does not even know the show (yet). And now I feel terrible :p_

 _I hope some people enjoy. Obviously, I'd be happy to hear from you..._

* * *

 **In Circles**

He has never understood her, or anything much of her world. But that is all right. He's been aware of it all the time. It is in the small things; when she tells him he can always use the same string of numbers to be able to talk to her; in the way people react differently to him when he is not wearing his own clothes; in her love of books and reading; in the ease of casual touches shared in this time. It is in the little remarks, too; when she quickly explains why her grandparents are no longer there, in the bookstore. Where he is from, the absence of people never needs explaining.

It's moments and little things like this that show him, time and again, how alien he is to this place or time. There are not many people of the age that Cassandra's grandparents would now be in his world. He tries to recall how many men or women over fifty he had seen in his lifetime _before_. Not because immunity had any link to age, but because fighting and stealing and dominance do. He tries not to think and remember just how many women and men he has killed who were too old to fight back properly. He knows it's not his fault as an individual that he has no morals to speak of. More difficult to catch those than the virus. Yet, now it is painful to imagine what she would think if she knew.

The same way he knows that he is not a particularly bad person, he knows that he's not stupid. Otherwise, he would not have lived; it's as simple as that. That any sort of resourcefulness he possesses has never been directed to a more noble end than surviving is, again, not truly something he has had a say in. Now he wonders, though, in those tiny moments when he does not keep tight enough control over his thoughts. That control is something he was becoming rather good at, at least.

Oddly—or maybe not so much—Cassandra did not seem to understand or care much about what little he let her know of the future. She gathered quite a lot of information from his own behaviour, he knows. It's why he keeps himself locked away in his head so often. She studies him, and he is afraid of the things she'll find if she looks closely enough at just the right moment. A lot of what has gone wrong with the world is there to see, in him.

So, it probably only makes sense for her not to want to know about the damage done to a world that he came to force her to help him prevent from ever existing. And yes, he _is_ fine with not adding to her burden. Sometimes, though, he knows he slips. That time in the museum he indulged himself for just a moment, because he had only just realised that he might very well not blink into peaceful non-existence through successfully fixing the past, but die a slow, excruciating death by the serum instead. He cut himself some slack there—and was at once reminded of how absurd any idea of putting the mission second really was. Cassandra was focused, and the realisation that right there and then, it was more her mission than his, was like a brick to his head. This would not do.

Confusion was what Ramse saw coming all along. It's not for the reason he assumed, though. Cole is not an idiot—no matter what his best friend thinks. He recognises attraction, he knows what arousal feels like, and has acted upon either of those things in the past … future. Whatever. The source of his confusion lies in the fact that he is aware he will inevitably fail in this situation. It should have been easy, the way Jones instructed him to see them all as dead already, walking corpses. Perversely, it was the very moment of Cassandra's death that took that comfortable (and comforting) trick away from him in very much the same manner that you would pull the ground out from under a person. In its stead, that moment left him with the entirely irrational certainty that he could not do anything right here. The mere idea of … _staining_ Cassandra is too ridiculous to contemplate. The future he carries around within himself—body, but mostly soul—has absolutely no business coming back to destroy the far more beautiful present … or past. It's that easy, he knows. It's not that he doesn't want to try and see what touching her would feel like. Hell, he's not even entirely certain she wasn't thinking about the same thing, on occasion. But it is simply not something that should ever be done, and so he preserves what little belief he has left by enjoying correctly doing the one thing he can. So, nothing confusing, after all. Or is it?

Thinking back to the future he comes from, there's nothing to compare this situation to. Well, of course there can't be, because nothing about society or people there is even remotely like it used to be, and still is, here. Intimacy is a cheap trade-off, or used to ensure the perseverance of the human race—he knows of a few sects out there in the unending wilderness that have made it their declared goal to raise large numbers of children—but it is not anything connected to … well, enduring relationships. He frowns. He has met very few people who openly talk about the subject matter of love, and Ramse certainly is one of those few. To be fair, Ramse told Cole, maybe he saw it as part of his duty as older brother. He tried to explain something that was, quite obviously, not something that could be made comprehensible by talking about it. Ramse is also the only person in Cole's memory to ever tell him he loves him, as well. So, to Cole, it has always seemed like his friend knows quite an awful lot about that sort of thing. Apparently, knowing and feeling it did not help in keeping it. _This_ is confusing, he admits to himself. Elena left Ramse only months after they had declared their intention of staying together.

Frequently, Cole has also suspected that this sort of emotional stuff was connected to Ramse's highly impractical and dangerous bouts of morality, which got them both almost killed more times than he cares to remember. It had pretty much killed _him_ , back in Tokyo, too. Because Ramse would never have been capable of putting that knife into him, had he had the least bit of doubt about the moral validity of his actions. It is strange to find that he still thinks so, that he credits Ramse with the ability to discern right from wrong. It makes no sense at all to believe in Ramse anymore, yet he does.

Believing in people is where all this started, and it is also going to be the end, when everything is said and done. Cassandra believed in Cole, he knows that. Unlike her, he also knows perfectly well just how incredibly misplaced that trust is, always has been. But if that is what might save her, if there is even the slightest chance he can use his absurd existence for anything like giving her a chance at living through the apocalypse, he can do no less than fight to his last breath. The knowledge that he has already lost is the only problem here…

He knows he is going to see her again. Or she him, at least, because that is the only certain thing left in his world, isn't it? He cannot bear to remember her death, but using the knowledge of it to stave off the threatening despair of her permanently being lost in his future works a little. No matter how or when, return she will. _This_ him is not going to be there to hold her when she dies, because he was already there. Will he be watching himself cry there, in that office? It is difficult to imagine otherwise, because surely he is not going to leave her all alone when he knows she is about to go… But she was so surprised to see him, and the way she clung to him spoke of a longer separation.

He needs to stop thinking about the end, he knows. There is nothing he can do to change it, as far as he can see. And honestly, right now he cannot see further than the man most likely dying next to him. He is caught here, in a time and a world that is more foreign than he has ever allowed himself to realise. Only now does he see that he has never been truly alone before, _now_ that he feels the absence of what connected him to this world as keenly as a missing limb. They used to be connected by that mysterious cycle looping their worlds. He can almost see it now, though the purpose, or the rules, still elude him.

There is no longer any chance of closing his eyes to the fact that Leland Goines would never have learned about the virus without Cole's own intervention. _He_ had created the loop that was going to destroy the world, hadn't he? He feels his heart lurch at the acknowledgment that places seven billion lives on his conscience. What if Ramse was right? The connection felt—if never explored—to Cassandra might well be what destroys the world, with him killing seven billion because he—or she—believe they need each other even though time wisely placed them apart.

Clearly he is losing his mind now. He is not given to this introspection crap, because it never changes a fucking thing, it only ever hurts to think about one's own or other people's feelings that you have absolutely no control over. So, yes. Maybe there is a bit of confusion involved, but it is mostly just pure fear that Cassandra Railly as a person elicits in him. And not at all for the reasons Ramse so enjoyed suggesting with lewd remarks. It is her innocent attempts at getting into his head, not his pants, that made him draw back from her and panic whenever he became aware of her doing it. She would look at him in a certain way, and he is so afraid of being found out for what he is—was—a murderer, an uneducated, volatile and violent man with no belief beyond that the greatest service he could do the world was never to have existed.

Maybe that is why. The reason this him is not going to be around to see Cassandra's return to fight the epidemic with all she's got. Maybe he will just decide that going through the cycle has been enough for him, and now that he is effectively out of the splintering and paradox picture he could simply step out of it, end it for good. The thought is unsettlingly appealing. Then again, death might take him any second now, anyway, seeing how he has served all his purpose in this charade of powers and puppeteers that he still fails to comprehend. Knowledge is not something that comes without a cost—if he has learned anything at all, it's this. And now he cannot pay anything anymore. He is at the end of his rope, and whoever is leading this merry dance must know it.

So unless there is much more black humour at work than Cole has credited the Witness or his Army of Shits with, he does not think he will ever be made privy to the great picture now.

A pained gasp draws his attention to the man on the bed next to his. The one, the last reason he cannot feel free to go and get himself killed yet.

The one reason he ever had to be angry with Cassandra, too. He begged her; she made her own decision. The first man she ever shot at to kill was Ramse. He understands. He also understands that, despite his efforts, he has managed to compromise something he did not even value before. Her way of fighting always used to be through _saving_ lives—that used to be who she was. And now that is not her anymore—now she did what Cole simply could not do, just as little as he could have put that knife to use in Tokyo. It was not possible, no matter the question of right or wrong.

Ramse was right. Cole was weak, too weak to see the mission to its end no matter what the cost. But Cassandra was not. And maybe he and Ramse both had realised that just in time, and maybe having her splinter was the one solution to this entire mess. There was no point in thinking any further ahead. He knows what he has seen, but nothing seems quite as immovable anymore as it used to. Not with him and Ramse caught on this side of the void that is the apocalypse, and her on the other.

.

"You know _what_ confuses me, Ramse? It was _you_ , you bastard. It was _you_ who made me do this in the first place. It was _you_ who decided this was my way to redeem myself, and then suddenly you decide no? I have always trusted you, my whole life was built on that, and I cannot see how you could possibly doubt me in this. I chose you … I chose you over a chance at a safe life with the West VII, and I chose you in Tokyo, and I have just put my fucking life on the line for you again here. So … enlighten me how you—" His voice is gone. All the air he meant to put into more angry words is held back by the painful clenching in his throat. He swallows a dozen times, to get his breath back, but it does not work, and for a second, as his vision blurs, he thinks, this is it. But then the tears clogging his airway manage to force their way through the iron hold he has had on them for ages. He curls in on himself, on instinct. He contains the awful sounds he knows he is making as best as he can, which is not much.

"You know," the voice is almost too quiet to hear. "I never thought I'd see you there." Ramse looks just as almost-dead as he had an hour ago. The voice is unmistakable, though.

It speaks to the absurdity of it all that Cole's first thought is whether now this moment is the most embarrassing of his life, replacing being found naked on the floor of Cassandra's bookshop. Next, predictably, is anger. Just as predictably, the hatred he would need to kill off the crying never comes.

Ramse does not open his eyes, but it is clear he has been listening, as he whispers on like it were important. Like it would make any fucking difference. "I cannot believe you survived … Tokyo. Had I known—" Ramse cuts himself off.

And suddenly, something clicks in Cole's head. "I will never go back home, will I."

"The circle is completed," Ramse agrees in a reedy voice.

Because if he ever made it back through time, there was no way in hell he would not have turned up at some point during those thirty years to stop Ramse from doing what he did. Have taken him … home. He tries to wrap his mind around it. Here's proof. Finally.

The next time he looks over at Ramse's face he is shocked, not by the few tears he can see creeping out from under the man's lashes, but by the undeniable smile accompanying them. "You that happy with this?" His voice sounds like something that needs oiling badly. "So damned happy I failed?"

It's too dark to see much, but when Ramse opens his eyes and stares straight at him, there's no mistaking the remorse, or the level of joy, which makes absolutely no sense at all in this combination, he thinks.

"You're an idiot," Ramse tells him, and wipes at the side of his face as he turns his head towards Cole. "I thought I would never see you again. The … latest you. The—" He takes a second to breathe against the pain, but cannot seem to stop talking. "The one that I—"

"Now you talk like …" Cole cuts him off. The last damned thing he needs is for Ramse to go _there_. Besides, the issue lies not in what Ramse felt, or did not, about killing Cole. So he cuts to the quick of things. "How could you, of all people, put a single life before the mission?"

Ramse fixates on his face with feverish intensity. "I told you before. You know damned well how. You have been doing the same damned thing, you hypocrite."

"No, I have not."

"You know, just because you have the good luck that this accidentally means the other seven billion might survive as well, does _not_ make you a damned hero for saving her."

"A hero?" His voice is dangerously close to breaking again. "What the fuck is wrong with you, Ramse?"

But there is no answer this time.

"You went back to thwart any attempts to stop the virus. Cycle or no cycle, it was you who made sure I could not stop it ... any of it."

"And it was you who told Goines," Ramse says on a pained exhale.

If he didn't't owe the bastard Cassandra's life, he might well hit him for this.

"You don't get it, Cole. Everything is as it _needs_ to be." Ramse's lips form a thin line of pain, and Cole can't quite avoid staring at the damaged hand in a fist on the sheet. "They call this a circle. A circle turns its course, and it will do so again, and again, and again."

Cole tries the image in his mind. "That is what they believe?"

"Yes. A belief—a religion, if you like. But I don't see why it is any less true than what Jones told us. From what I have seen over the past thirty years, it certainly looks more plausible than anything she ever had to offer. And it's why they were waiting for me, knew how to find me and help me do what I helped them do."

He does not, cannot say anything to that for a long time. The problem lies in the temptation to believe. If he could come to accept this faith that seems to have become Ramse's, he might find peace. He would no longer be able to go on either; it'd be the peace of the tomb. A tomb already so full of the ghosts of people who had given the ultimate sacrifice in the desperate hope that _he_ could make a difference to it all.

"Don't you see it? We have no proof that any of Jones' theory is sound. Or rather... if her basic assumption holds true, that we can only move up and down our own timeline, the idea of changing anything that happened before we ourselves existed is simply preposterous. I have had thirty years to learn. And at this time, there were a number of Joneses. And several theories of how time works. The thing is ... if Katarina's basic assumption were correct, all she could ever have hoped to create was the ultimate paradox. But if hers is the wrong one..." Ramse seems stuck for a way to say this that Cole will get, and the idea that Ramse does possess tons of pre-apocalypse knowledge now is another reason to be angry. "... if hers is the wrong one, then we created a dozen of new timelines with god knows what sort of futures. You get this?"

"I think they have fucked with your mind good and proper, that's what I certainly get. They just used you to make sure their precious cycle would not break through Jones' and my intervention. You have been what allowed them to countermand every single thing we did—no need for any more fancy theories there to explain it otherwise, just to calm your conscience."

"Am I? You know, you and Jones are not the first people to try and mess with time. And all the Army does is protect it, because changing anything will create a paradox that is likely to end the world by tearing spacetime apart. Not what you and I used to call the Apocalypse—the real thing. That is why they counter any attempts to _correct_ catastrophes, yes. They either do it by bringing the traveller on their side or, if possible, by pairing them with another who ensures that the original events unfold in the necessary and relevant aspects."

Cole is too tired to argue belief tonight. "You should simply have killed me and been done with it."

"Everything happened as it needed to." It sounds like someone saying the rosary. "There is _nothing_ more powerful than fate."

Only, there is. Maybe.


End file.
